Chatter

Owned by Jodie Miners
Last updated: Nov 26, 2019
2 min read

How good is Chatter, hey? Chatter is so broad, there are many many uses for it. Once you start using Chatter well, you will wonder how you ever did without it. 

Whilst looking through the success community recently I am so surprised about the lack of understanding of how good Chatter is! Especially the post that says "This is supposed to be a business tool, not social media...". Nope, no way - Chatter is NOT about Social Media - Nope, no way! If you think that you are not using chatter properly and you are definitely not getting the value out of your Salesforce investment! </rant>. 

Things you can do with chatter. 

  • Collaborate on the record about the record. 
  • Work out loud - write down everything you know about that record as and when you know about it. 
  • Use Record Topics to collaborate with others (including non-salesforce users) about particular topics related to that post. 
    • Find out who is interested in or working on that topic within your org. 
  • Set up a virtual "war room" for collaborating on a key opportunity or account. 
  • Link to or upload articles or documents in the media or public realm about how your accounts are doing. 

Issues with Chatter

Most of the issues you will have with chatter will come from user adoption. Getting an old dog to learn new tricks is really hard, and an old stubborn dog is infuriating. But hopefully if you have a few key users that will lead by example, it will work. 

Also, small teams tend to just talk amongst themselves rather than write things down on a chatter record. Once they see the benefits, they will hopefully start to use it more. Teams of one or two can even get benefit out of using chatter. 

People who just LOVE documents - you know those people - the ones who open Word and go File > New to record anything new. And then they save it in their my documents or on their desktop with a filename like Topic A new revisted latest 15.6.15 (final).docx. I think they are the hardest to get onboard, because they think they are doing a good thing right now by documenting things, and they think they NEED their headings and styles and 100s of different coloured fonts to communicate. 

See Also

Content

The following things go well with Chatter

My Articles

See my in-depth article on Chatter Notifications http://thedetaildept.com.au/2013/05/16/salesforce-chatter-notifications/

In that article is a link to a great series of videos by Engineers Australia about how they release Chatter out to their members https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLDQNGqMTrOiZ2KpWEmzk9LNL3qFf-U0T